Tom Hanrahan, head of Microsoft's Open Source Technology Center stated in Microsoft's announcement, “The Linux device drivers we are releasing are designed so Linux can run in enlightened mode, giving it the same optimized synthetic devices as a Windows virtual machine running on top of Hyper-V. Without this driver code, Linux can run on top of Windows, but without the same high performance levels. We worked very closely with the Hyper-V team at Microsoft to make that happen.”

Doesn't hurt that they now want to include Linux in their pantheon --doesn't have much to do with desktop Linux users, though..

With Hyper-V, the next-generation hypervisor-based server virtualization technology, as a role, plus flexible licensing policies, it's now easier than ever to take advantage of the cost savings of virtualization through Windows Server 2008.

This is reasonably old news (see the newsletter on mint blog). There's a rumour that this was due to an allegation that they were in violation of the GPL. If this enables more companies to run/try out linux, even if only on top of M$ initially, I'm all for it.

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